Qwest Corporate - gotta love 'em...

Like everyone else on the planet, I'm trying to get as much as I can for as little as possible.  When it comes to bandwidth, that paradigm holds especially true.  I hate to admit it, but as cheap as I am, my Comcast bill is almost $100.00 a month.  $1200 a year for faster Internet seems insane.  Of that $100.00, approximately $44.00 of it is for cable television (which I never watch).  Of the remaining $66.00 I manage to collect $30.00 from my roommate, and another $20.00 is collected from a "customer" of mine on my wireless network.

In addition to my Comcast expenses, I choose to maintain my dialup account at Southwest Cyber Port for a couple reasons: 1) I've been a customer of their's since Mark (the owner) was running it out of his bedroom.  And 2) I use the dialup account as a test base for my web pages.  This little convenience and customer loyalty adds $11.00 a month to my Internet bill.  After doing the math, one can see that I'm paying about $61.00 a month for Internet and cable television (which I never watch - Did I say that already?).  So when this solicitation showed up at my house...



...I was pretty happy.  I read the entire flyer thoroughly - twice - looking for those little hidden costs.  Apparently Qwest is above actually mentioning things like Federal Excise Tax, State Sales Tax, County Tax, City Sales Tax, Franchise Tax, Telecommunication Relay Service, Federal Access Charge, Customer Equipment fees, blah, blah, blah.

I called up Qwest, and after an hour on the phone with their sales person, I was finally a DSL customer.  My plan was to have all the DSL equipment up and running at my house for a day or two before cancelling the Comcast service.

A couple days later I was awakened by a disturbing call from a SWCP technician (they're all technicians there - no sales people - awesome).  She says to me, "Mr. Frank, I need to discuss with you your new contract with SWCP."  Still rubbing my eyes from the previous night's slumber, I eloquently said to her, "Huh?"  She said, "We just got notification from Qwest that you were increasing your service to DSL...blah, blah, blah."

Long story made short, since I've been using SWCP in conjunction with my Comcast service, I assumed that the switchover to Qwest DSL would not effect my dialup service, especially since Comcast had no effect previously.  As it turns out, the option for unchanged dialup service was possible, but was not presented to me by the original Qwest sales person.  As a matter of fact, she made no mention of a rate increast from my ISP.  A subsequent sales lady claimed that that information "...wasn't available to them."...oh brother.  It was a subsequent call to SWCP that netted the new information I was looking for.  He told me to just use MSN as my ISP (part of the original DSL package), and that things would go on as they always have with my SWCP dialup service.  That was good news.  I love those guys at SWCP!

I got on the horn and told the lady that I wanted to change my original package from DSL/SWCP to DSL/MSN.  Unfortunately, as a "regular customer," I was no longer entitled to the "promotional" rate.  I would have to pay the full rate!  This upset me to say the least.


Click picture to hear pissed off phone call

As soon as I got off the phone I decided to take a second gander at the solicitation.  It seems that, in my anger, I'd overlooked something:



Since it was only October 3rd, it seems that the nice sales lady bitch had misquoted the deadline for the promotional offer.  I chuckled as I picked up the phone a second time (10 minutes later) to sign on as a new DSL customer.  Now that I was no longer a DSL customer, I could now sign up for DSL service at the promotional rate.
 


Not only did I receive the promotional rate, I was given this good news:

Click picture to hear new and improved customer service representative

So not only did I get my promotional rate back, but I actually saved $5.00 over my initial "promotional rate."  The day was mine!!